Genene Jones

What the record shows

Genene Jones is a former licensed vocational nurse from San Antonio, Texas, who was convicted by a jury in 1984 of murdering a 15-month-old patient at a Kerrville pediatric clinic and of injuring a second child in San Antonio. Her known crimes span 1981 to 1982, at Bexar County Hospital (now University Hospital) in San Antonio and at a small clinic in Kerrville. She was sentenced to 99 years and a concurrent 60 years in 1984. Facing mandatory release in 2018 under an old Texas good-time law, she was indicted in 2017 for five more infant deaths and, on January 16, 2020, pleaded guilty to one of them, the 1981 murder of 11-month-old Joshua Sawyer, receiving a life sentence. Courts have convicted her of two murders. Prosecutors have suspected her in far more: ABC News reported that prosecutor Ron Sutton estimated between 11 and 46 infant deaths in Bexar County from 1978 to 1982, and NBC News reported in 2017 that she was suspected of killing as many as 60 infants in Bexar and Kerr counties. Those figures are suspicion, not findings of any court.

According to ProPublica, Jones worked the 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift in the pediatric intensive care unit at Bexar County Hospital in the early 1980s, a shift that colleagues came to call "the Death Shift" because of the number of children who died on it. The five children named in the 2017 indictments, four boys and one girl aged three months to two years, died between July 1981 and January 1982; prosecutors alleged overdoses of the anti-seizure drug Dilantin, the blood thinner heparin, or an unknown substance. ProPublica reported that the hospital conducted internal probes and ousted Jones without alerting criminal authorities, then gave her a good recommendation.

In 1982 Jones went to work for pediatrician Kathleen Holland's new clinic in Kerrville. ProPublica reported that eight children with routine medical problems stopped breathing there in a single month and one died: Chelsea McClellan, 15 months old, who was injected with the paralyzing muscle relaxant succinylcholine on September 17, 1982. Wikipedia's account, citing contemporary reporting, states that suspicions at the clinic centered on a vial of succinylcholine that had been tampered with, that Jones failed a polygraph and was fired by Holland in September 1982, and that she was arrested at her San Angelo home on May 24, 1983, charged with McClellan's murder.

The murder trial was moved on a change of venue to Georgetown, in Williamson County. A jury convicted Jones of murder in February 1984, and on May 14, 1984, she was sentenced to 99 years in prison, according to ABC News. Later in 1984 she was sentenced to a concurrent 60 years for injury to a child: ProPublica reported the conviction concerned 1-month-old Rolando Santos, who nearly died from repeated heparin overdoses at the San Antonio hospital but survived. In the 1980s the Bexar County district attorney suspected Jones in other child deaths but did not charge her.

Texas's 1977 Mandatory Supervision law, meant to ease prison overcrowding, awarded good-time credit that required Jones's release after she had served roughly a third of her sentence. ABC News reported in 2013 that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice then projected her release for February 2018; ProPublica later gave the scheduled date as March 2018, after 34 years and eight months served. The Texas Board of Nursing revoked her license on June 10, 2011, after she wrote the board a letter apologizing for "the damage I did to all because of my crime" and calling her conduct heinous, ProPublica reported. Prosecutors also cited a 1998 parole interview in which, according to the parole officer, Jones said, "I really did kill those babies."

To prevent her release, Bexar County District Attorney Nico LaHood's office obtained new murder indictments. ProPublica reported the first, returned May 25, 2017, charged her in the December 1981 death of Joshua Sawyer, 11 months, from a Dilantin overdose; further indictments followed for Rosemary Vega, 2, who died September 16, 1981, Richard "Ricky" Nelson, 8 months, who died in July 1981, Patrick Zavala, 4 months, who died in January 1982, and Paul Villareal. Each carried a $1 million bond, and Jones was moved to the Bexar County jail when her state sentence ended. NBC News quoted LaHood saying his office aimed to hold her "accountable for as many children's deaths as the evidence will support."

On January 16, 2020, Jones, then 69, pleaded guilty before state District Judge Frank Castro to the murder of Joshua Sawyer and was sentenced to life in prison; the other four murder counts were dismissed under the plea agreement, ProPublica reported. She must serve 20 years before becoming eligible for parole, with credit for about two years in jail awaiting trial, which places her first eligibility around 2038, when she would be 87. Wikipedia, citing Texas Department of Criminal Justice records, lists her at the Dr. Lane Murray Unit in Gatesville.

Jones was born on July 13, 1950, in Texas, and was adopted and raised in San Antonio, according to Wikipedia. She graduated from high school in 1968, married and later divorced, had two children, and became a licensed vocational nurse in 1977, joining the Bexar County Hospital pediatric ICU in October 1978. Her case prompted a 1983 Texas Monthly investigation and the 1989 book The Death Shift, both by journalist Peter Elkind, who continued covering her prosecution for ProPublica.